I STILL DREAM OF ORGONON

Saturday Is For Things and Stuff

Can’t play today; I’m busy trying to finish up a writing project, and then I have things to do and stuff to take care of. Or is it stuff to do and things to take care of? I always get the two confused.

“Things” implies material objects, or at least designated tasks. “Stuff” could be anything from a pile of toys to sitting and daydreaming. “I have stuff to do.” Precise language is wonderful, but sometimes imprecision is useful ;-)

Wait just a gosh darn minute, John.
I just read an article that included these estimates;
A former Google Ceo estimates the sum total of human knowledge, by 2003, at 5 exabytes.
Cisco estimates that internet traffic will reach 966 exabytes by 2015.
I probably made one more comment than I wanted too, about the ebook thing. I don’t think any spouse of any candidate should be political fodder. If there are any circular debates going on, I don’t even want to look, and sure as hell would not jump in.
966 compared to 5.
That’s an awful lot of porn and cat videos John.
My Saturday is free, compared to a chock full Sunday.
So if you’re out “living you life” what do I do?
Oh, wait, there’s this giant pile of unread books.
Nevermind

Things are undeniably useful, and I’m fond of things – but stuff has things beat all hollow, on account of “stuff” being not only a noun but also a verb.

Similarly, I’ve enjoyed being stuffed at various banquets with friends or family, but I don’t even know what being thinged would mean, and I refuse to speculate in a family-friendly comments section. On the other hand, people who have worn out the patience of their interlocutor may, in none too friendly a fashion, be invited to get stuffed …

Oh, if you keep a cat, or keep two or three,
You know that cats are creatures just like you and me.
And have needs, as we do, and if they could speak,
They’d say, “I need some stuff from Bertha’s Kitty Boutique.”

You can do things with things. Stuff just kinda… sits there. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have some stuff around, but things have more purpose. I guess I’m just a little too utilitarian to truly appreciate stuff.

Honest now, folks: which movie would you rather see? “The Thing” or “The Stuff”? (Ha!)

Which Lovecraft story would you rather read — “The Thing on the Doorstep” or “The Stuff on the Doorstep”? The stuff would probably be passably rugose, necrophageous viridian stuff, but still. Stuff is not scary, except insofar as it tells you it has been left there by a properly terrifying Thing.

Not that I expect my eloquent persuasion to be accepted by the intolerant, doctrinaire, non-reasonable-nomenclature-based stuff-fanatics infesting this very thread. Stuff-lovers are the circle-squarers of the general moniker community, and properly addressed with pejoratives.

We seem to prefer to be stuffed rather than thinged, by early poll numbers.

my cats refused to attack either the sample thing or sample stuff until I poured catnip on both. Now the 32 pounder has the thing under the couch, the 16-year-old mangled the stuff, and the other three are rolling in the excess catnip.

I suggested to my wife that we continue the experiment with leeches but she elbowed me and mumbled something rude about Hugo nominators…

My H.S. friends had a running joke about “I like stuff.” Basically, one friend convinced another to go to the junior prom with a girl that he didn’t know very well at all. She wanted to go with Friend One, who was dating someone else anyway, and so Friend One figured it would be a good idea to set up Friend Two with her instead. Despite the best intentions, their conversation the entire night could be summarized up in her expressing in a squeaky voice “I like stuff.”

I voted for “things”. This isn’t a particularly strongly-held conviction. I had a middle-school English teacher who disallowed the use of the word “stuff” in this manner. Apparently this rubbed off on me for some reason.

Sometimes, I feel like a thing. Something whole in itself. Sometimes, I feel like stuff, like the stuff in something. Stuff is part(s) of a greater whole.
When applied to John Scalzi:
The OMW trilogy is a thing.
Zoe’s Tale is stuff, leftover might-as-well-make-a-buck-on-it filler.
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 is stuff, obviously.
TGE is stuff in guise of a thing, a long short story marketed as a $9.99 book.
TSWOTND is stuff, tinkerings and cogs clunking around in his skull. I’d be a shame if a better short story lost because of Scalzi’s popularity with Hugo voters.
Fuzzy Nation is stuff, remnants from his childhood.
Red Shirts sounds like a thing, fingers crossed.

Things, for all the reasons stated above. Especially this: Ron Mitchell says April 14, 2012 at 12:11 pm “I voted for things. Because I take the things that concern or interest me from the stuff around me, and then ignore the rest of the stuff.”

This is a more interesting question than you may imagine. Quite a few years ago, I enjoyed a glass ow wine with a German chemical engineer who had moved into management consulting. He pointed out that there was a substantial distinction in the German language between Stoffe (stuff) and Dingen (things). Most of the companies he dealt with, given his chemistry background, were in Stoffe businesses – making substances sold by volume, not by count. And one of his central points was that firms good at Stoffe would usually struggle in a Dingen business. The R&D is different, the cost accounting is different, the key manufacturing technologies are different. So the distinction between stuff and things can be decidedly non-trivial. Unlike my friend from that long-ago evening, I’m a mechanical guy by training, so I voted for “things.”

“In math we’re often interested in equipping things with extra structure, stuff, or properties, and people are often a little vague about what these mean. For example, a groupis a set (stuff )…”
[http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0608/0608420v2.pdf#page=17]

I did not vote, because, although I don’t want to seem scatological or anything, I prefer sh*t.

I’ve got sh*t to do. I’ve got sh*t to take care of. And, of course, when that’s all done, I’ll have my sh*t together, which is one of the highest aspirations of mankind. Neither things nor stuff can measure up to that.

“stuff” are those gifts from your strange aunt that are hideous and you hide in the back of your closet hoping she never comes for a visit so you don’t have to pull them out.

“things” are Star Wars action figures that you display in dioramic scenes all over your desk at work and every open shelf space at home (at the same time keeping a mint unopened copy safely tucked away in storage).